Building a mobile app locally
After you build a Pega Platform™ application, you can generate it as a mobile app for Android or iOS devices. To adhere to potential security or testing requirements in your company, you can build a Pega Mobile Client™ app locally without uploading any sensitive files to the server.
Prerequisites
To build a mobile app for your Pega Platform application, make sure that you complete the following tasks first:
- Get the distribution package for either Android or iOS from your Pegasystems Global Customer Support representative.
- Download and install Apache Ant 1.9.6 or later, a tool for automating software build processes.
- Download and configure the following items:
For Android- Android SDK Tools 25.2.3 or later
- Android SDK Build Tools 24.0.1
- Android SDK Platform for API level 25
- Android SDK extras: Google Repository (rev. 40 or later)
- Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 8 x64
- A code-signing key
For more information, see Sign Your App on the Android Studio website. - Android Support Repository (rev. 40 or later)
- Mac OS X 10.11.5 or later (the latest update is recommended)
- Ruby 2.0.0 or later (included with OS X)
- Bundler gem 1.13.6 or later
You must install the bundler package manually, for example, by callingsudo gem install bundler
in a terminal window. - Xcode 8.1.
- Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 8 x64
- A mobile provision profile prepared for the app
For more information, see Creating Development Provisioning Profiles on the Apple Developer Portal. - A valid development and distribution certificate
For more information, see the Certificate, Key, and Trust Services Programmer's Guide on the Apple Developer Portal.
Creating a customization.zip file
Before you build a mobile app, create a customization.zip file to hold all the configuration files, certificates, and assets that are needed to build your mobile app locally.
- Download the branding-assets.zip file that contains the Pega default branding resources such as, for example, the app icon or a splash logo. To do so, go to the Branding assets templates for various Pega Mobile Client versions article and choose the latest simplified branding template.
- Use Windows Explorer, Mac Finder, or a similar tool to create an empty customization.zip file in a directory of your choice.
- Copy the android, common_assets, and ios folders from the branding-assets.zip file to the root directory of the customization.zip file.
- To customize the look of your mobile app, replace the contents of the android, common_assets, and ios folders with your branding assets.
- In the root directory of the customization.zip file, create a customization.properties text file and populate it with a map of parameters and their values, according to your needs. For a complete list of available parameters, see the Setting Pega Mobile Client parameters section of the Adjusting the Pega Mobile Client behavior with custom parameters article.
Building a mobile app
Do the following steps to build the mobile app, which you can then install and debug on a device or emulator.
- Extract the contents of the distribution package (Android or iOS) into an empty directory of your choice.
- Place the customization.zip file that you created in the previous section in the root directory of the distribution package.
- Do one of the following actions:
- If you are building an app for the Android platform, paste an Android certificate file (android-certificate.p12) for signing APK applications in the root directory of the distribution package.
- If you are building an app for the iOS platform:
- Paste an Apple certificate file (ios-certificate.p12) in the root directory of the distribution package,
- Paste a mobile provisioning profile file (named default.mobileprovision) for signing iOS applications in the resources directory of the distribution package.
- Run the tool that builds the mobile app by entering the following command from the distribution package's root directory:
ant pega
- Navigate to the out/ directory to confirm that the output APK or IPA files have been created.
- To view the status of the build, review the exit_status.json file for the status of the build:
- A successful build has a status similar to the following example:
{"exitCode":0,"messageArguments":[],"warnings":[],"reason":null}
- An unsuccessful build has a status similar to the following example:
{"exitCode":3000,"messageArguments":[],"warnings":[],"reason":"Customization zip is empty or not provided"}
For a list of error codes, see Error codes for locally built mobile apps.